Tuesday 5 July 2011

the flowering of 'Samuel Sommer'

The Magnolia grandiflora is flowering.  So far it has been opening its flowers one at a time, and the second bloom is just going over.  There are a large number of fat buds, and while it is the nature of these trees to spread their flowering over quite a long period, I think there should be a good show in due course.  The flowers are huge, parchment white, with a lemon scent.

My plant is the variety 'Samuel Sommer'.  I chose it because the spot where I wanted to grow it is not especially well sheltered from the south-westerlies, and Jim Gardiner (RHS Director of Horticulture and erstwhile curator of Wisley and the Hillier Arboretum) recommended it in his excellent guide to magnolias as the most wind-resistant form of M. grandiflora.  There turned out not to be many suppliers when I bought my plant, back in early 2003, and I ended up getting it from the Architectural Plants nursery near Gatwick. ( It was a very wet day, and the Systems Administrator offered to drive me there, which was probably prompted by the fear that I might not make it safely round the M25 and back in that weather in my small and elderly car, rather than a burning desire to walk around a plant nursery in the pouring rain.  The drive there was so traumatic even in the System Administrator's large and luxury motor that returning by the motorway was vetoed out of hand, and we came back through London and across on the Woolwich ferry).

The only plant they had was knee-high, and the person serving me explained that they weren't really doing it any more as it was difficult in pots, and that they only had this plant sculling around because the head propagator was unaccountably fond of it, and they couldn't possibly charge me the full price for such a small plant.  I thought it looked a perfectly good specimen, especially as Jim Gardiner recommended planting all magnolias small (although experts always disagree, and I'm sure I read in a magazine recently that Karen Junker recommended planting them large).  Eight years on it is 3-4m tall and wide.  It flowered from an early age, but this year it looks as though virtually every branch ends in a flower bud.  (Magnolias flower on the tips of their branches, not in the leaf axils.  It's just how they do it).  The instructions that came with it said to prune it more than you would believe possible.  I have tipped it back a couple of times around March, to encourage the production of side shoots and make it bushier, always with some trepidation in case I have left it too late and am cutting off those terminal flower buds.  I didn't cut it this year, as it looked so sad and sorry for itself after the long, cold winter that I didn't want to subject it to any further stress.  However, it is a bit too open and see-through for my taste, and I must be resolute and prune it next year.  Apart from wanting a dense, bushy head in that spot, I presume that more branch tips will equate to more flowers.

They come from the American South, and don't really like winters like the last two, but it didn't suffer any dieback, and the only lasting damage was that one branch broke off under the weight of snow.  It should have felt right at home this afternoon, given how humid it has been today.

The fallen leaves are large, leathery and hang around visibly until removed, instead of tactfully blowing under a bush and quietly rotting down like deciduous leaves can do.  This is probably its only really unattractive feature.  The leaves while still on the tree have handsome russet brown undersides due to their covering of furry indumentum, a characteristic shared by several varieties of M. grandiflora, and some rhododendrons.  There are quite a few named varieties around, and apart from one called 'Little Gem' which has noticably smaller leaves than the others and doesn't reach the same height, all of the ones we sell at work sound remarkably similar from the boss's descriptions on the labels, having large lemon scented flowers at a young age, plus brown undersides to the leaves.  I suppose that their individual characters become apparent as they grow, and it would be interesting to see a row of them in maturity, side by side for comparison.

Traditionally M. grandiflora has been cultivated as a wall shrub, but mine is in the open ground, admittedly protected from the north and east by the wood, house and lie of the land.  There is another fine freestanding specimen in one of the nearby villages, and a whole avenue of them at Antony in Cornwall (a beautiful garden worth making an effort to see for the William Pye water feature, or for Tim Burton fans because it was the setting for the garden scenes in Alice in Wonderland), so I don't think they need wall protection, at least in the southern half of the country.

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